'Wittgenstein,Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism' Stuart Greenstreet

"Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess:

Austrian artillery unit, Eastern Front 1915

This year’s centenary of the First World War coincides with Ludwig Wittgenstein beginning writing his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Latin for ‘Logical-Philosophical Treatise’),
the only book the Austrian philosopher published in his lifetime. Not
the least astonishing fact about it is that, as we shall see, most of it
was written between 1914 and 1918 by a brave young soldier fighting at
the front line.

In July 1914, when the whole of Europe suddenly found itself at war,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, a son of one of the richest men in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, was twenty-five years old. He had spent the
previous two years (1911-13) at the University of Cambridge, studying
philosophy with Bertrand Russell, who was a lecturer there. But he
happened to be at home in Vienna on 28th July 1914, when his country
declared war on Serbia. A week later, the day after Austria had declared
war against Russia as well, Wittgenstein volunteered to join the
Austrian army as an ordinary soldier, even though he was exempted from
compulsory service by poor health."

Excerpts: "Tolstoy had distilled the four biblical accounts of Christ’s life and
teaching into a compelling story. Wittgenstein was so profoundly moved
by it that he doubted whether the actual Gospels could possibly be
better than Tolstoy’s synthesis. “If you are not acquainted with it,” he
told his friend Ludwig von Ficker, “then you cannot imagine what effect
it can have on a person.” It implanted a Christian faith in
Wittgenstein. Before going on night-duty at the observation post, he
wrote: “Perhaps the nearness of death will bring me the light of life.
May God enlighten me. Through God I will become a man. God be with me.
Amen.”"

"Wittgenstein’s leading idea in the Tractatus was that propositions – that is, statements asserting facts, such as ‘it is raining’ – are a picture
of what they describe. This is Wittgenstein’s ‘Picture Theory of
Language’, or as he himself called it, his ‘Theory of Logical
Portrayal’:

“We can say straight away: Instead of: this proposition has such and
such a sense: this proposition represents such and such a situation. It
portrays it logically. Only in this way can the proposition be true or
false: It can only agree or disagree with reality by being a picture of a
situation” (Notebooks p.8).

He added later:

“The great problem round which everything I write turns is: Is there an order in the world a priori, and if so what does it consist in?” (Notebooks p.53) ..."

"To the question ‘What is your aim in philosophy?’, Wittgenstein replied, “To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.”"